So I was initially opposed to the idea of a female Doctor. It did seem like wrong-headed PC-ness on the part of the Beeb which has, in the last couple of seasons, been trying too hard with wrong-headed PC-ness. Bill’s LGBT angle was so heavy-handed and unnecessary. A badge of honor for the Beeb without any understanding or sensitivity behind it.

But then Tilda Swinton’s name was rumored to be in the mix and I thought, my god, yes! She’d be perfect! The show has also been planting the seed for a couple years now. Michelle Gomez has so perfectly delivered the Master’s gender-change that it almost felt weird to have a male Master show up in the finale. In what is probably just an accident, the show handled such a gender change in the best way – the Master felt like it. Tra-la-la.

What helped put all this in focus for me: When Kris Marshall emerged as the front runner, I was worried. He would have been the “safe” pick – and I would have been insulted by that pick. Another white male hamming it up on screen. There’s been a cookie cutter aspect to all of the NuWho Doctors, even when they’ve bene amazing actors who tried to make the show their own. We’ve seen each of them fall for or become deeply affectionate towards their companions in a weirdly inappropriate way and we’ve seen them struggle with being “lonely gods.”

It’s the former problem, which even got lip service between Capaldi and Bill, that has really rubbed me the wrong way since 2005. The Doctor is a thousand (now two thousand) year old alien. I realized, with all the hubbub about a female Doctor, that I, as a fan, never saw the Doctor as a man (or cared about his gender, rather). The First was a grandfather, the Second was a childlike clown, the Third was aloof and patronizing, the Fourth was alien and mercurial, the Fifith was a grandfather again trapped in a young man’s body, the Sixth was insane after an unstable regeneration, the Seventh started the ancient one/lonely god motif, we had no time to get the know the Eighth, and then we stormed into NuWho.

So why not be daring? And something NuWho has never been is daring… But it needs to be in 2017. The show has struggled for so long to reconcile itself with its long history in a way that’s sort of hobbled it. It alternates between wanting to be different (such as putting the Companions in the driver seat) and paying such deep track fan service that only a narrow niche of the audience will appreciate it.

This is a show that completely renews itself every few years but, during the NuWho years, it’s kind of failed to do that. Even in-show dialogue during the 50th Special sort of put the lampshade on the similarities between the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors, and Capaldi, despite trying to make it his own, is really just a grey-haired hybrid of Ten and Eleven. The show needed a new breath, and that was only going to come with a very different Doctor (I was also hoping for a minority).

On the human side of things, with the Companions, the dynamic is going to change quite a bit. And since that’s the part of NuWho I have the most trouble with, I look forward to it.

But when it comes to battling robots and monsters, a woman can get herself locked out of the TARDIS and stuck in the middle of a zany adventure just as well as any man!

Oh, right. We're going to have to adjust to Doctor Who dictating women's fashion...

Thirteen's costume has been revealed. Also revealed is her new TARDIS. The TARDIS exterior has aped the 60's TARDIS since 2010, but now it's reverted to the 70's-80's version. (Whittaker's outfit also calls back to the Fifth and Sixth Doctors, with just a touch of the Fourth Doctor.)

The Christmas episode was, by far, one of the strangest in NuWho...and also indicative of all of the problems of the Moffatt era. It was steeped in nostalgia and fan service but didn't really understand the nature of that nostalgia, or the reason for the fan service. It revisited the troubling sexism that runs through NuWho and tweaked the characters in a direction that, for normal people in 2017, is offensive and baffling.

But then it also kind of kicked out the grandiose storytelling that has marked episodes like this in the past.

David Bradley is, sadly, underused and abused as the First Doctor. The episode handles the flashback so well -- giving us original scenes from The Tenth Planet and morphing into Bradley and (all too briefly) the new Ben and Polly. It ends with the old black and white refeneration sequence, against shifting back and forth between Bradley and actual footage. All very lovely.

But it fails to remember that (a) The First Doctor willing went into his regeneration and (b) he whole "I don't want to go" thing is a contrivance of the Moffatt Era. The Doctor has always gracefully accepted regeneration (except for the Second Doctor). Drawing out a regeneration for an entire episode, once again, is exhausting. David Tennant spent an entire year regenerating, and Matt Smith speechifying his way to a blink-and-done regeneration was tedious. Capaldi gets the same outgo. He spends the whole episode fighting off the regeneration, he gets a long-winded monologue at the end, we get a visit from fucking Clara.

Meanwhile, Bradley's First Doctor is in the same boat. And for all the nostalgia, it's as if no one involved in this episode ever actually watched Hartnell's Doctor. Bradley's overt sexism is meant to be a ha-ha nod at the 60's culture, but, seriously, let's leave that to Austin Powers, okay? Being a woman in Hartnell's TARDIS did mean lots of screaming, damsel-in-distress stuff, but it was also pioneering in terms of equality. The companions that followed the first trio represented the burgeoning feminism of the time. Despite the awkward all-male world, we saw companions emerge in 60's and 70's Who that were generals willing to sacrifice themselves, individualistic career women, computer geniuses who were specifically written to make the male companion look like a dunce,and so on. To have Bradley's version of the First Doctor think female companions are nothing more than house cleaners was strange and out of character. To take a companion whose stated purpose was to bring gender and color diversity to the show and then awkwardly mock her gender and sexual orientation through a 60's lens was an insulting and shocking misstep. To then take that one step further and imply a sexual connotation to the First Doctor's comments to Bill was almost beyond the pale in a show that has been, for seven years, two steps forward and three step back in terms of diversity.

The daring element of the episode is also what drags it down. There's no bad guy. No nefarious plot. Everything's okay, everyone lives somewhat happily ever after. The Doctor gets a win. New aliens are introduced, with comically bad special effects, whose sole purpose is to image the memories of the dying in the moment before their death. These are used for entirely pleasant and happy purposes. What should have been an interesting twist that turned the tropes of the show on its ear turned out to be a sitzkrieg. The Doctors won't want to die. The First because he's scared. The Twelfth...because...he's tired? We don't really get any details glimpse into why, which is odd and sort of removes us from the story. Bill is just a construct, essentially filling the shoes of not-Rose in Day of the Doctor. She's a guide, but the fact that her species is new, her purposes unclear, and the ultimate explanation is that she's just a recording device sort of ruins that.

We end up with a placeholder episode that's literally frozen in time, with some good supporting stuff from Gatiss, a misuse of Bradley, and an overwrought yet oddly diffused swan song from Capaldi.

Then we get 80 seconds of Whittaker...and those 80 seconds and two words are the best thing about this episode and, perhaps, the best thing to emerge from NuWho in years.

I liked the Capaldi speech at the end. I felt like he was speaking the audience instead the "new" Doctor. Both in terms of where the world is now and in a "Why don'y you give this Lady Doctor a chance, eh?"